This undated snapshot of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on the corner of Franklin Street and Fruit Alley shows it much later in its 99-year lifetime. There’s a car parked out front, but the exterior still looks the same as it did in 1912 when the front tower, art glass windows and new pews and pulpit were completed, just in time for the historic festivities that 1913 would bring.
Church records report these improvements cost $1,500, an indication that this was a large and prosperous congregation for its time. And resourceful too – the pulpit and pews were the work of cabinetmaker and longtime parishioner William T Baker.
Bill Davison and Marlene Bransom’s publication, “Early African American Life in Waynesburg” is a chronicle of these times, gathered from family histories, obituaries, census data and microfilmed newspaper clippings. Their research tells us that church members then spent months making plans to send representatives to a “gigantic Philadelphia celebration of the 50th anniversary of the freeing of the slaves held on September 1913”.
Bethel AME Church also celebrated its founding that September and the Washington Republican took photographs.
One photograph in particular shows the styles of the time and a glimpse into the personalities of the officer trustees in charge of church business in 1912.
Baker was one of the older church trustees who got the ball rolling in 1883 when he negotiated a selling price of $312 with Sarah Lindsey for this plot of land on Franklin Street
The church officially broke ground in 1884 and on August 21, 1887 was dedicated under the leadership of the Rev. Sanford H. Lacy.
The congregation now had a spiritual home in the community that couldn’t be denied, along with a collective voice to speak out on the politics of the day. On June 1, 1892 the church hosted a meeting to decry “sufferings, intimidations, murders, lynchings and outrages” happening in the Jim Crow South, followed by a second meeting at the Greene County Fairgrounds that ended with a proposal to form a national organization to petition President Harrison to urge Congress to take action.
On August 11, 1896 Bethel AME was granted a charter by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and on April 4, 1899 the Afro-American Republican League was organized at the church, representing 83 voters of Greene County. The next month, representatives of the League attended the state convention in Philadelphia.
Church membership was once numbered 100 families and in 1920 the parsonage next door was purchased from Wiley Huffman, according to Jim Moore staff writer for the Observer Reporter, who covered the church in a final tribute on March 29, 1984. None of the four remaining members could recall the year the last service was held at the church that “remained in the shadow of the Waynesburg College gym as a silent link to the past”, but Moore notes that two years ago the furnishings had been removed and William Baker’s hand carved pulpit had been put in storage. An underground stream and surface runoff from recent spring weather along with long time erosion had caused a cave-in that took out part of the church foundation and a section of Fruit Alley the week before. There would be no centennial celebration. Bethel AME Church was razed soon after this article appeared, a year short of its 100th birthday.
